I have a few audio books on CD that I listen to occasionally. One of them is A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson, read by the author. Bryson’s a wonderful writer, with a way of turning a phrase which I find really funny and which I end up emulating far too much sometimes; and he has a British accent, which is just funny in itself (come on now, you know British accents are inherently funny — I’d snicker at Tony Blair even if he was declaring war on the US).

A Walk in the Woods is about Bryson’s attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail. Interspersed with his narrative are observations about the trail, about wilderness, about natural history, and about America’s relationship with the wilderness. The hike itself is, for him, an intensely personal experience, nearly a spiritual one (though I’m pretty sure Bryson is at least an agnostic). There are parts of the book where he describes the changes in his friendship with his hiking buddy that are very moving and almost sad.

This morning as I drove to work, I listened to the final lines of the book: “I had seen the wilderness. I had made a friend. I had come home.” Every time I listen to this book and those last few lines, I get a sort of thrill.

Imagine my shock, then, when I ejected the CD after the final notes of the closing music, and tuned in to NPR to hear the following stories, all delivered in a sharp, newscasterly, tone:

1. Lance Armstrong has been accused of using “performance-enhancing drugs”;
2. Arizona and New Mexico have declared states of emergency because of the high numbers of illegal immigrants in those states; and
3. Pat Robertson, leader of the Christian Coalition and self-professed Christian, advocates the assassination of the leader of Venezuela.

It was a shocking and unpleasant experience. Newscaster voices are the polar opposite of the funny British accent; a newscaster — even an NPR newscaster, and they specialize in calm, bland tones — could read you a story about a kitten playing with a ball of string and make you want to go out and build a bomb shelter and stock it with plenty of duct tape and plastic sheeting. And the subjects being read about were universally depressing and indicative of nothing more than man’s continuing determination to destroy everything in the world that smacks of humanity or dignity or charity. I wanted to go back to Bryson and the Appalachian Trail, to hear more about his changing relationship with his friend and about the history and flora and fauna of the A.T.

I changed radio stations and found a Rossini piano piece being played on the other NPR station and that made me feel better.

On another note, I’ve decided that Bill Bryson is my new intellectual hero. I don’t know the man personally, and I don’t know much about him, except that he’s normally a linguist who also writes travel literature and who got so very curious about certain topics on science that he wrote A Brief History of Nearly Everything, which is an outstanding layman’s guide to topics ranging from the Big Bang to biochemical evolution. How can you not admire that kind of curiosity and ability to stretch one’s mind?